Anora (2024) Review: Sean Baker's Palme d'Or Winner Earns Every Inch of Its Ending

This review reflects the author's personal opinion. Trumpwatcher is an independent film publication, not affiliated with any studio, streamer, or festival. We do not cover political content.

An honest anora review has to begin with the closing shot, because Sean Baker's film is reverse-engineered from it. Without spoiling the specifics, the final ninety seconds are the kind of scene that retroactively reorganizes the previous two hours. Watching the film a second time — and I strongly recommend a second time — you realize Baker and editor Sean Baker (he cuts his own pictures) have been quietly laying the groundwork for that final beat from the first crane move over the Brighton Beach boardwalk. The screwball comedy is the trojan horse. The tragedy is the cargo.

If you are deciding whether to give the film its hundred and thirty-nine minutes: yes, on the biggest screen you can find, and ideally in a crowded theater. The screwball middle act plays as comedy with an audience and as a slightly different film without one; the closing beat hits harder when the room around you has been laughing for an hour.

What Anora gets right

Baker's most underrated decision is structural. The film is a three-act screwball comedy with a single tonal pivot, and the pivot is placed almost exactly at the seventy-minute mark — the precise moment a conventional studio comedy would be cueing the third-act reconciliation. Instead of reconciliation, Baker delivers a hostage situation, and the film never returns to its earlier register. It has been quietly preparing the audience for the pivot through a series of small calibrations — the camera holds, the lighting cools, the dialogue rhythms tighten — and the result is a structural inversion that does not feel like a betrayal of the comedy. It feels like the comedy was always being asked to support a different kind of building.

The specifics

Cinematographer Drew Daniels (working in his fourth feature with Baker) covers Brighton Beach in two distinct grammars: a swooping handheld for the celebration scenes, and a static, slightly elevated coverage for the interior dialogue scenes. The grammar tells you, scene by scene, whether the film is operating as fairy tale or as observation. By the third act, Daniels has dropped the celebratory grammar entirely. The static observation has won the argument the film is making about which kind of cinema is honest about its protagonist's actual life.

Spoilers are confined to a clearly labeled section near the end. Read freely until you reach it.

Where the film loses ground

The second-act home-invasion sequence runs about forty-five minutes and asks the audience to extract sustained comedy from a scenario that has serious power-imbalance teeth. Baker manages the tonal walk better than the premise has any right to expect, but a viewer with a low tolerance for that kind of comedic mode is going to find the middle hour exhausting rather than energizing. The film is asking a real question — can the screwball mode survive when the stakes are this material? — and answers it on the back of an extraordinary lead performance, but the answer is not foregone.

A second observation: Mark Eydelshteyn's Ivan is written as more of a function than a character. The screenplay needs him to be a feckless, charming, and ultimately disposable engine for the plot, and Eydelshteyn plays the function with conviction, but the film never gives him an interior beat that a reader of the character might expect. Whether that is a screenplay weakness or a structural feature depends on how you read the closing scene.

How this film sits in its genre

The closest siblings are Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938) for the verbal pace and gendered comic energy, John Cassavetes's Gloria (1980) for the New York textures and the protagonist who refuses sentimentality, and Andrea Arnold's American Honey (2016) for the way it lets a working-class American protagonist drive every scene without ever being condescended to. Baker is most clearly in Cassavetes's lineage — the rhythms are urban, the camera is patient, the casting reaches for actors the studio system would not — but the third-act tonal pivot belongs to a different tradition that Arnold and Andrea Pallaoro have been developing in the 2010s.

Readers tracking Baker's career arc should pair this with The Florida Project (2017) and Tangerine (2015), both of which carry the same compassion and refuse the same sentimentalities. Our recent piece on The Substance works through a different kind of female-led 2024 argument; our Conclave review covers a parallel craft tradition in a different register; and our Hit Man piece on Linklater works through the same screwball-pivots-to-noir mechanic Baker is using in a different key.

Performances worth singling out

Mikey Madison delivers the lead performance of the year and is going to be in every awards conversation she belongs in. As Ani, she has to play a sex worker who is simultaneously sharper than every man in the room, hopeful in a way she will not name, and ultimately exposed to the kind of indifference she has been working her whole adult life to refuse. Madison plays all three registers without ever signaling. The final scene — which I will not describe specifically — is a master class in playing the silence between two characters when the audience already knows the silence will not resolve.

Yura Borisov, as Igor, is the other standout. The screenplay positions him as muscle and lets him slowly become the only character in the film who registers Ani's actual personhood. Borisov plays this not as romance but as recognition, which is harder and more honest. The closing beat works because Borisov has been earning it scene by scene from his first appearance.

A quick note on craft

Baker cuts his own pictures, and the cutting is where a careful anora review earns its judgment. He sustains scenes past the conventional comic-rhythm cutoff and trims them sharply just before they would tip into sentimentality. The interior of Ivan's mansion is shot and cut with an almost real-estate-listing flatness; the boardwalk and Brighton Beach exteriors are cut with the camera in motion. That contrast is the entire argument about what Ani's actual life looks like and what the fantasy looks like.

SPOILERS AHEAD — read only if you have watched the film

The final scene — Ani and Igor in his idling car after he has driven her home, the slow attempt at intimacy that collapses into a breakdown — is one of the most quietly devastating closures in recent American film. Baker holds the shot past the point a more conventional film would have cut, and the hold is doing all the work. The audience watches Ani try to perform the only kind of exchange she has been allowed to imagine, and watches Igor refuse it not because he does not want her but because he sees her. The cut to black arrives only when the audience cannot bear another second.

A working anora review has to credit the structural courage of that ending. Baker has built a screwball comedy for an hour and forty-five minutes and finishes the film by withholding every comic release the screwball form has trained the audience to expect. The withholding is the argument. The argument is that the world the film opened with does not actually exist, and that the closing world — quiet, real, full of an unnamed care — is the one Ani will have to learn to live inside.

The verdict

Trumpwatcher Score: 4.6 / 5

Rating: 4.6/5

Watch it in theaters if it is still playing, and watch it twice. Baker's ending is the kind of structural payoff that rereads the whole picture, and a second viewing repays the attention the first viewing demanded. For a double feature, pair it with Cassavetes's Gloria for the New York lineage, Arnold's American Honey for the contemporary American-realism tradition, or Baker's own The Florida Project for the through-line. Any of the three will deepen the picture you just watched.

For the wider context behind our 4.6, this anora review sits in our independent reviews archive; our verdict methodology is documented at how we score films.

This article is the author's independent critical opinion and does not constitute professional advice. Trumpwatcher is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any film studio, distributor, streaming service, festival, political party, or campaign. All trademarks, titles, and proper names referenced belong to their respective owners and are used for editorial identification only. We do not host, link to, or condone unauthorized copies of any film. Always watch films through official theatrical or licensed streaming channels.